SACRAMENTO –Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Monterey Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 1504, legislation that would protect wildlife and preserve California’s coast and waterways by banning cigarette filters.
“Cigarette filters leach dangerous chemicals into the environment, kill animals that eat them, and cause communities to spend millions of taxpayer dollars for clean up,” said Stone. “California has many laws in place to curtail cigarette litter, but people continue to illegally discard tons of cigarette filters each year. The current laws aren’t sufficient to address this major problem.”
Findings published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health report that 845,000 tons of cigarette filters wind up as litter around the globe each year. Because of the litter, cigarette filters remain as the single most collected item of trash collected by volunteer groups and organizations that conduct parks, rivers and beach cleanup events.
“Our volunteers have collected 466,000 cigarette filters in our clean ups just around the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary alone since 2007,” said Laura Kasa, Executive Director of Save Our Shores. “This is by far the most pervasive type of litter in our environment. Our community has attempted to educate the public about the dangers of this toxic litter but it has not made a significant dent in the problem. I commend Assemblymember Stone’s creative approach to this issue. It is time for bold action.”
California has strong laws to deter people from littering, but people continue to discard cigarette filters on roadways, in parks, in gutters, and other places in their communities. In California, citation rates for cigarette litter from vehicles are annually about five times the amount of citations issued for general litter from vehicles. Unsurprisingly, filters remain the single-most littered item on our highways. The California Department of Transportation has estimated the costs to clean up cigarettes on roadways at $41 million annually. The City and County of San Francisco estimates its costs for cleanup at $6 million annually.
“Banning the sale of single-use filters in California will substantially reduce the burden of cigarette waste cleanup for our communities, help protect our treasured beaches and wildlife, and reduce blight in our urban living environments. Cigarette filters are the most commonly collected waste item in the world, and with this legislation, California can show how the volume of this waste and its impact on the environment can be substantially reduced,” said Dr. Thomas Novotny, Professor of Public Health at SDSU, Former Assistant Surgeon General in the US Public Health Service, and CEO of Cigarette Butt Pollution Project.
Discarded cigarette filters hurt people and wildlife alike. From 2006 to 2008, the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported approximately 12,600 cases of children ingesting cigarettes or cigarette filters, especially children under six years of age. According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration, it is common for fish, birds and other animals that mistakenly eat cigarette filters to starve to death because of a false feeling of satiation from the plastic in the filter.
“An estimated 3 billion toxic, plastic cigarette filters are littered in the Bay Area each year,” said Allison Chan, Pollution Prevention Campaign Manager for Save The Bay. “Millions of them make their way into our waterways and the Bay through storm water systems, where they pose an environmental threat that we can no longer ignore.”